


Death in Her Hands

by superblackmarket



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: M/M, More family bonding, Post-Film, lots of catastrophizing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:47:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27044494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superblackmarket/pseuds/superblackmarket
Summary: “Nothing is forever, not even us, and we have lived long enough to see that anything can be taken away from you,” Nicky said. “Gods, countries, species, even the weather.”“And change—it isn’t good or bad, necessarily, it’s just how it is,” Joe said. “All you can do is decide what to do with the time that is given to you.”“Oh my god, you did not just quote Gandalf at me!” Nile exclaimed.OR, Nile faces the future with Joe and Nicky.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 80
Kudos: 447





	Death in Her Hands

**Author's Note:**

> This story can be read as a sort of sequel to my previous piece from Nile's perspective, "The Sunny Side of the Street," but they also function independently.

**i.**  
  
Earthquakes in Japan, flooding in Bangladesh, cyclones in the Philippines, wildfires in the American west, drought in Sub-Saharan Africa—soon into her new life, Nile realized that she would probably live to witness the twilight of the planet, the next extinction event.

The thought filled her with unholy terror.

Joe didn’t have much consolation to offer, telling her that he and Nicky had reached a similar conclusion themselves a few decades ago, that their lifespans would probably extend beyond the habitability of the planet, at least if humanity kept to its present dire course. “We’ve made our peace with it,” Joe said with a shrug. “The end of the world isn’t necessarily the end of _life_ , and Nicolò and I aren’t averse to the possibility of Mars, if it comes to that. But we’re far from ready to give up on this particular planet.” He reminded her that humanity had survived Vesuvius, it had survived the Shaanxi earthquake and the Yellow River floods; Nile could tell from his tone that he thought she was being a bit obsessively catastrophic about the slowly unfolding climate disaster.

She looked at him—sitting there at the table, talking about _humanity_ while eating leftover curry from a plastic takeaway container with a plastic fork—and felt a wave of irritation. “You know you’re part of the problem, right?” she said. “We all are. We go through so much plastic. And it’s not just food packaging, it’s toothpaste, lotion, shampoo—all those little bottles you guys like to steal from fancy hotels? And don’t forget the bottle _caps_ , or those square thingies they make to close the bag of bread.”

“Nile.” Joe pushed her forgotten mug of tea into her hand, and she took it with a distracted nod of thanks. A sleepless night, a long morning devoted to increasingly dire internet searches; the words tumbled out of her in an agitated torrent:

“I can’t stop thinking about it—everything that’s produced and thrown away, that can’t be broken down organically, it’s just marooned inside the ground forever. And we’re not going anywhere, we can’t be like, ‘oh, this is a problem for the next generation to deal with,’ ’cause we’ll still be here, won’t we? We’re gonna be stuck with the consequences of all this shit, everything that’s happened, everything that’s _been_ happening… And obviously there’s all the other stuff, too, coal, oil, fracking, contamination, chemicals, cars, air conditioning, air _planes_ —! We’ve got Copley jetting us around—god, I don’t even wanna think about our carbon footprint. Oh, and I just read an article about phthalates—”

Nicky walked in, flushed with exercise, and Joe gave him a hungry look, like he wanted to eat him. “What is thal—phal—fthal—” Nicky dropped a kiss on Joe’s cheek and stole a bite of his curry. “I cannot pronounce this word. What is it?”

“It’s a chemical, right?” Joe said, trying to move his food out of range, but Nicky simply pulled up another chair and continued to help himself.

Nile nodded, thinking briefly that Booker would have known about phthalates. “Yeah, they’re in everything, they leech into the environment, and they’re linked to all kinds of health problems,” she said grimly. “And when you think about the damage to the oceans, the coral reefs... We’re fucked. Everything’s falling apart so quickly, and it’s like we’ve… fast-forwarded into our own apocalypse.”

Neither of them replied immediately. They were sharing the curry now, trading bites, and Nicky was mumbling under his breath, still trying to pronounce _phthalates._

“Never mind,” Nile said heavily.

“No, no, we are just thinking,” Nicky said, and Nile marveled at that, the casual _we_ : were they thinking together, some kind of Vulcan mind-meld? “I don’t want to give you bullshit, and I am trying to come up with the words… because there is no easy answer, is there?” Nicky gave her a rueful smile. “Many of our best qualities as humans—our creativity, our cleverness, our cooperation, the fact that we can work together in these big societies, and pass knowledge on from generation to generation—these things can turn out to be damaging, no? We are very smart and inventive, and we can change the planet by doing things that have no evil intent.”

“Thanks Nicky, that’s, like, really reassuring,” she said. 

“Oh, Nile.” Nicky put down the plastic fork and trained the full intensity of his orblike gaze on her. “Nothing is forever, not even us, and we—Yusuf and I—have lived long enough to see that anything can be taken away from you—gods, countries, species, even the weather. And…”

“And change—it isn’t good or bad, necessarily, it’s just how it is,” Joe said. “All you can do is decide what to do with the time that is given to you.”

“Oh my god, you did _not_ just quote Gandalf at me!” Nile exclaimed, laughing in spite of herself. “Unreal, Joe.” 

“Who is Gandalf?” said Nicky.

Joe chuckled. “Nicky didn’t make it ten pages into _The Hobbit_.”

“Ah, Tolkien. I didn’t care for his book, no,” Nicky said.

“There’s three more, actually, where that came from. He wrote a trilogy,” Joe said.

“Did he?” Nicky grimaced. “More fucking elves, I suppose.”

Nile cackled, imagining the expression of outrage that would have crossed her little brother Makonnen’s face at that. Koney was a total fantasy nerd. He was obsessed with _The Lord of the Rings_ —the books and the movies—and had spent years trying to learn Elvish. She’d never understood the appeal herself, and she’d given him lots of shit for how damn _white_ the whole franchise was. If there were any Black people in those movies, they were well-hidden under layers of monster prosthetics. But Koney hadn’t cared, he told her it was all allegory anyway. Before she shipped out to Afghanistan, she’d agreed to watch the whole movie trilogy with him, and—

_No._

_Don’t think about him._

Maybe Joe and Nicky were right, Nile reflected. Anything could be taken away from you. Change wasn’t good or bad, it simply _was._ She wondered how long it had taken them to come to terms with being semi-permanent fixtures in a world that wasn’t.   
  
  
**ii.**  
  
It turned out Joe and Nicky were not so sanguine as they first appeared. They were simply concerned with a more imminent crisis than the fate of the planet, a crisis that took precedence over phthalates and glaciers and fossil fuels. Nile caught on the day that Andy decided to resume training with them and busted her stitches right open again.

She had just been dumped on her ass by Nicky when it happened. Nicky, who moved faster than quicksilver and struck like lightning. He’d been dumping her on her ass all morning, and every time he helped her up again, he had the gall to tell her _how well she was doing_ , in that soft lilting accent of his.

The air was humid and clammy with the threat of rain. She made the mistake of glancing up at the sky to check the progress of the fast-moving thunderclouds, and a half-second later she was lying flat on her back in the churned-up mud of the yard. Mud in her hair. _Goddammit._ Seething with frustration, she accepted Nicky’s outstretched hand and let him haul her upright.

“You’re doing very—”

“Don’t you _fucking_ say it,” she snapped.

“You are making excellent progress.”

Refusing to dignify that with a response, she let her eyes drift over to where Andy and Joe were sparring nearby. Joe raised his arm to block a swift uppercut, then froze. Unimpeded, Andy’s fist slammed into his nose, breaking it with an audible crunch.

“Joe, what the hell?” Andy snapped.

Blood was pouring from Joe’s nose. Nile glanced quickly at Nicky, but Nicky didn’t seem fazed. He called out something in Italian, tone amused.

Joe didn’t move.  
  
“Seriously, what the hell?” Andy said. “I was going easy on you.”

“You—you’re bleeding,” Joe said thickly.

“No, jackass, _you_ are—”

“Andromache,” Nicky hissed suddenly. He was at her side in a flash, and now Nile could see it, too, the reddish stain blooming against her grey shirt. He plucked gingerly at the fabric, and Andy slapped his hands away.

“It’s fine, Nicky, don’t fuss at me—”

“Stitches must have ruptured,” Joe said. His nose had already healed, but his eyes were wide and shocked, the lower half of his face a gory mess. “Fuck, is there even a hospital on this island? Nile, call Copley, tell him we need a helicopter to Glasgow—no, Inverness, Inverness is closer—”

“I don’t need a fucking hospital!” Andy snarled. She pressed a hand to her side, and seemed almost surprised when it came away bloody. “It’s just a loose stitch, Joe, I’ll sew it up again myself.”

“The hell you will. Nile, please get Copley on the line and—”

“Andy, come inside with me,” Nicky intervened. “Let me take a look, okay?”

A brief standoff ensued; then, to Nile’s considerable surprise, Andy folded. She went inside with Nicky, and Nile found herself alone with Joe. Joe, who was muttering to himself in a language that she didn’t understand, looking utterly deranged—no, scratch that, _terrified_ —as he made to follow after the other two, then pivoted sharply and started pacing instead.

“It’s easy to bust a stitch,” she offered, after she’d watched him tramp up and down the length of the yard several times. “Andy jumped back in too fast, but she’s gonna be fine, Joe. It wasn’t even your fault.”

“I…” Joe’s large hands clenched into fists, and he was chewing on his bottom lip.

Nile had never witnessed this kind of naked fear from any of them before. They were all pretty self-possessed folks, and though she’d seen Joe get steaming mad—mostly when the subject of Booker came up, once when the coffee machine broke—she had no idea what to do with this raw-edged anguish.

“I, uh, I guess I’ll go see if Nicky needs any help,” she said.

“He has three medical degrees,” Joe replied absently.

“If he has three degrees, then why were you shouting about a hospital?”

“Because this is _Andromache_ ,” Joe said, and turned his back to her. His shoulders heaved. Nile wanted to comfort him, but what could she say? That Andy could conceivably live another forty, fifty years, and here he was, acting like she was already dead? That it was morbid to grieve somebody still in the prime of her life? 

That nothing was forever, and anything, _anyone_ , could be taken from you?

She went inside.

The door to the downstairs bathroom was firmly shut, and she hovered there, unsure if she ought to knock, listening to the low murmur of Nicky’s voice and Andy’s occasional emphatic replies. She thought they might have been speaking Greek.

Nile was on the verge of going back outside to see how Joe was faring when Nicky’s voice rang out suddenly: “Don’t fuck with me, Andy,” he said in English, and Nile froze where she was.

“Goddammit, Nicky.” Andy’s voice. “I’m not fucking with you. I’m being serious. Things are different now. You and Joe, you’ll have to get used to this—or are you gonna lay an egg every time I get a scratch?” She laughed, a dry sound that reminded Nile of rocks scraping together.

“You think this—it is funny to you?”

“The look on your face right now, yeah, it’s a little funny. Have you finished with the stitches? Hand me my shirt, or I’ll tell Joe you were staring at my tits.”

“I haven’t put the bandage on yet. Andy…”

“C’mon, Nicky, you were a priest. Isn’t the afterlife your specialty? You should be giving me all that good priestly counsel, telling me the right way to die—thy kingdom come, thy will be done, all that shit.”

“I don’t think anything could prepare me for the loss of somebody I have spent more than eight centuries loving and cherishing with my whole heart,” Nicky said flatly.

“You know, I’m starting to think Lykon got lucky—dying on the battlefield the way he did, no time to think, no time to dwell, no time for me and Quynh to fuss at him and turn his life into a fucking funeral.”

Nile didn’t hear Nicky’s reply; she was backing away as quietly as she could, a lump in her throat.  
  
  
 **iii.  
  
** Andy was sulking in the living room, under strict orders to _rest_ , so Nile opted for the kitchen, where Nicky and Joe were preparing a tagine. Their fluid, bantering rapport still mystified her. It was free of restraint, free of the fear of consequences; it didn’t take the shape of any relationship she had ever seen before. When her dad was alive, her parents—

_No. Don’t think about them._

_Focus on Joe and Nicky._

They worked together seamlessly, Joe combining the spices while Nicky blanched the cauliflower and tomatoes. Nile stood by, drinking a soda. She’d offered to help, of course, but Nicky had just said, “No thank you, Nile, maybe next time,” as though he didn’t let just anyone help in his kitchen. He was pleasant and direct, even warm, but Nile thought there was a privacy about him, a reluctance to bare himself to the world—or maybe just to her, so new and untried.

This quality was not shared by Joe, who was chatty and animated as ever. “A traditional Maghrebi tagine would almost certainly be made with chicken, but Nicky and I are trying to stick with the vegetarian thing,” he was saying. He had on a garishly pink t-shirt that said _Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols!_ , and Nile wanted to laugh every time she looked at him. “Nicky’s really perfected the substitutions—chickpeas, tofu, tempeh, what have you—and I’ve found I don’t miss meat so much.” 

“How long have you guys been vegetarians for?”

“A little over a year, maybe?” Joe scratched his beard and looked over at Nicky for confirmation; Nicky nodded.

“Is it like a moral thing, or—” she started to ask, but Nicky was shooing her gently out of the way so he could get some cooking implement or other from the cupboard behind her. Joe said something to him in Arabic, and Nicky replied with a laugh in his voice. 

Then Joe turned to her and said, “C’mon, Nile, he doesn’t need our help in here, let’s go outside for a bit.” He tried to snag a handful of dried apricots, but Nicky smacked his hand with a wooden spoon and Nile decided not to try her luck with the almonds. Nicky was too damn fast.

They peered in on Andy, who’d dozed off in the armchair with a crocheted afghan over her lap. Nile thought she looked cute like that—in a slumbering-lion-don’t-disturb kind of way—but Joe was frowning as he opened the sliding door to the deck and pulled it softly closed behind them. Nile leaned her elbows against the railing and watched the waves break and foam across the sound. Guffing up a newsy froth. She thought the sea looked irritable today.

“Think it’s gonna rain?” she asked.

“Always.” He sighed. “Weather has a very profound effect on the emotions. It can be a significant force in steering us in certain directions in our lives, causing all sorts of… lurches. I wonder sometimes what would have happened if Nicolò and I had met in a blizzard instead of the desert.”

“…Yeah.” Covertly, she watched his profile as he stared out over the water. Even in that ridiculous t-shirt, Joe was almost too handsome to look at. The way his beard framed his mouth, how his eyes crinkled up when he smiled—well, it wasn’t for her to dwell on.

But he wasn’t smiling now. He drummed his fingers restlessly against the railing. “The Atlantic Ocean has all sorts of massively melodramatic weather systems,” he said. “I’ll never understand how people can live out entire lifetimes in northwestern Europe. Such a shitty climate. When Nico and I stayed out here in ’47, though, the summer was an almost hysterically fine one—for Scotland, anyway—weeks and weeks of uninterrupted sunshine, and the locals went completely off the rails. We did, too. Batshit crazy, as the saying goes. We all emerged screaming from our caves and raved at the light.”

Something was definitely off with him, Nile thought. His shoulders were stiff with coiled tension.

“Of course, that excess of sun was punished with a spectacularly awful winter. I prayed five times a day that it would never snow again. Things are different now, of course. In these latter days, with temperatures and sea levels rising, I’m always wondering, fuck, is this going to be our last winter? Will this be the last time my Nico and I see snow?” There was something forced about his heartiness, almost manic. “He says—Nicky does—that being vegetarians will help in the long run.”

“Joe—” 

“Andy’s never been the sort of person who naps,” he said abruptly.

Nile blinked at him. “It’s normal?”

“Normal?”

“Normal human people need rest after they sustain an injury, especially if it’s an injury they keep busting open ’cause they’re too damn pigheaded to take care of themselves,” she said, with some asperity.

“Normal human people,” Joe repeated, his expression strange. Then he shook his head as he repeated it a few more times to himself. _Normal human people. Normal human people. Normal human people.  
  
  
_ **iv.  
  
** She sat on the edge of the bathtub, watching Nicky pierce his own ears in front of the mirror.

“Any, ah, modifications—they will heal the moment the jewelry is removed,” he explained, producing a zippo and sterilizing what appeared to be an ordinary sewing needle in the flame. “So if you take it out, next time you will have to do it again, yes?”

Nile Freeman—former combat marine, newly-minted immortal warrior—felt the bottom of her stomach drop out when Nicky pushed the needle through the lobe of his left ear. Her vision swam, and she looked away hastily. It was just the Nicky effect, she told herself. Andy and Joe she’d grown comfortable around; Nicky was still an enigma to her. There was something both ferocious and gentle about him, an ever-present glimmer of irony. It was as if he believed they shared a series of intrinsic jokes that did not need to be verbalized.

“I, uh, I got my ears pierced when I was eleven or twelve,” she said to distract herself, as Nicky replaced the needle with a small silver hoop. “My mom took me to Claire’s.”

“Claire’s?”

“Oh god, it’s like the most awful chain store where you can buy cheap jewelry and have your ears pierced. But they do it with this gun thing…”

“You had your ears pierced with a _gun_?” Nicky’s eyebrows shot up.

“A needle gun, yeah. It’s pretty barbaric. Both my ears got infected after, and my mom was so pissed. She said she woulda done it herself at home, if she’d known they would do such a lousy job at the store. She hadn’t wanted to take me in the first place, she wanted me to wait till I was sixteen. But my dad had just been killed overseas, and I… I guess I wore her down. It was the only time I ever got my way like that.” Her voice wavered, and she clenched her jaw.

_No. Don’t think about…_

Nicky was watching her thoughtfully in the mirror. “She was strict with you, your mother?” he asked.

“She had to be, she was raising two kids alone on the South Side,” Nile said defensively. But Nicky’s eyes were calm and level, without any trace of the cloying pity that usually crept over people’s faces when she talked about her family. “We fought a lot when I was a teenager. She never coddled me and my brother, and sometimes I thought she was too… callous, maybe?”

“Callous,” Nicky repeated. “In English, this word is a homonym for callus, the hardened tissue that forms over a wound. Correct?”

“…Yeah.”

“Sometimes people must develop calluses on their souls in order to survive, and when they have others depending on them for survival, too, that hardening or thickening of soul-tissue might be understood as a gift,” Nicky said. “But a very abrasive gift, no? One that is not easy or pleasant for us to receive, and sometimes it leaves us with calluses of our own.”

Her chest was tight. It felt a little like drowning, or how she imagined drowning might feel. She’d never drowned herself; she’d only dreamt Quynh’s…

“…Nile?”

“Yeah?” She couldn’t look at him.

“Just the one earring, do you think, or should I pierce the other, too?”

Nicky, she thought, was the most tactful person she had ever met.

“Uh, both, I guess?”

“Okay, I think so, too,” Nicky said. He ran the needle through the flame again. “Yusuf—Joe—enjoys wearing the rings and necklaces that I have given him over the years. But I myself am forever misplacing such things. In my ears, at least, the jewelry stays put.”

Nile sniffled—discreetly, she hoped—and nodded. “Yeah, my necklace is the only thing I’ve ever managed to hang onto. I inherited a pair of diamond studs from my grandma, but…”

Before she remembered to look away, Nicky had shoved the needle through his right earlobe. The bottom of Nile’s stomach dropped out again, and she heard a roaring in her ears. Black spots danced across her vision; she tumbled backwards into darkness.

When she opened her eyes, she was sprawled out in the bathtub. Nicky had folded himself in beside her, and her head was resting on his shoulder. “What…” Her mouth felt dry and cottony. “What happened?”

“Nile.” Nicky sounded funny, sort of stifled. A tremor quaked through his body, and she forced her head—still heavy and swimming—off his shoulder.

“Nicky, what happened? Did I… _die_?”

“Nile, oh Nile.” Nicky turned to look at her, and she thought, fuzzily, how very dashing the silver hoops in his ears made him look, dashing and even a little bit rakish. “My dear friend, my brave comrade…” His voice wavered. Then his faced cracked into a broad smile and he dissolved into peals of laughter. “You fainted.”  
  
  
 **v.  
  
** It was almost worth the embarrassment, for how hard Andy laughed. She brought it up constantly. “Remember how Nile fainted watching Nicky pierce his ears?” she said at breakfast, grinning wickedly when Nile groaned and dropped her head into her hands. “Remember when Nicky pierced his ears and Nile fainted?” she called from the sidelines, while Joe and Nicky demonstrated the rudiments of fencing. “Remember that time Nile fainted because Nicky put a needle through his ear?”

Nile supposed she was glad they were making new memories together, memories that weren’t filled with blood and death and betrayal.

But all the same—

“Will you lay off?” she demanded, sitting with Andy on the deck one afternoon. “It’s not, like, _that_ funny.”

“Oh, but it is.” Andy didn’t look so drawn and haggard these days, and her cheeks had finally regained some color. She was clearly restless and keen to test the limits of her healing body, but Nicky was keeping a close eye on her stitches. _Not quite yet, Andromache_. Andy had looked at him like she wanted to split his skull in two with her axe, but she’d backed down.

“I just don’t like needles, okay?” Nile said grumpily. The sea was smooth and tranquil today. She watched a fishing boat bob gently in the distance. “Lots of people don’t.”

“You modern people have so many phobias. There never used to be so many.”

“I think we just have names for them now,” Nile said.

“Thanatophobia. Fear of death. That one’s been around for a long time.”

“Uh huh.” Nile watched Andy from the corner of her eye.

“For millennia, I’ve had nothing but time,” Andy said. She rested her hand over her injury and prodded at the bandage Nicky had freshened that morning. “It’s strange to know that the end of my life is approaching, in the general sense, but not to know when exactly. Another form of waiting. Different from what I’m used to. What do mortals _do_ with their time, knowing that it’s terminal?”

“Uh…” Nile didn’t feel equipped to have this conversation with Andy. Discreetly, she shot a glance through the sliding glass door, hoping she could catch the eye of Joe or Nicky within. Nicky was sitting on the couch, reading, and Joe lounged beside him, his head in Nicky’s lap. As she watched, Joe craned his neck up, and Nicky dipped down. They met in the middle and kissed. Nicky dropped the book and pulled Joe closer. Nile looked away. There was no help forthcoming from that quarter, and she didn’t want to ruin their moment.

She chewed the inside of her cheek, thinking. “My grandma died from cancer, lung cancer, when I was sixteen,” she said slowly. “She wasn’t that old, only in her sixties, and she wasn’t ready to go. Most of the time she was depressed. Some days she got all overwhelmed with panic and grief, and other days she felt nostalgic for when she was younger. I remember wishing we’d been born in the past, like way back in ancestral Africa, when there was less cancer and stuff, when we might’ve lived full lives before human industry contaminated everything.” 

“But then there would have been the perils of that time to contend with,” Andy pointed out.

“Yeah, I know.” She caught Andy’s restless fingers in her own, before Andy could fuck up her stitches again. To her surprise, Andy didn’t resist, merely squeezed her hand.

“In almost every age that I can recall, the mortals thought they were living out the end of days,” Andy said. “Maybe that’s the human condition. Maybe we’ve always felt condemned to death.”  
  
  
 **vi.**  
  
“Oh my god, I’m sorry!” she yelped, backing away from the door. “I’m so sorry, I should’ve—”

“Nile, wait—”

“Jesus Christ, sorry, I’m sorry, I’m going right now!” She banged the door shut behind her, her face—still damp with tears and snot—burning furiously. She would probably need industrial-grade bleach to sear the potency of that image from her retinas. Joe and Nicky, naked, gilded in golden lamplight, Nicky sitting on the edge of the bed, Joe kneeling between his legs, Joe’s head moving up and down, Nicky’s hands in his hair—. God, what had she been thinking, bursting into their bedroom in the middle of the night, she must have been out of her damn mind—! She stumbled away down the hall, praying she hadn’t woken Andy, too.

“Nile!” The door opened partway and Nicky slipped out, a pair of sweatpants slung dangerously low on his narrow hips. “Nile, what is the matter? Come back.”

“It’s nothing, never mind, I should’ve knocked, I’m sorry, you can get back to—”

“Nile,” he said firmly, “please come back.”

Cheeks on fire, she followed him into the bedroom, eyes fixed resolutely on the floor until she heard Joe chuckle. “It’s okay, Nile, we’re both decent.”

 _Decent_ was something of an overstatement, Nile thought, given that Joe was clad only in maroon boxer briefs and Nicky’s sweatpants seemed on the verge of falling down around his ankles. But whatever, semantics. “I’m really sorry, guys.”

“Stop apologizing, we don’t mind at all,” Joe said. “That was very PG-rated, anyway.”

“PG?” she spluttered. “Joe, that was _definitely_ R—”

“One delayed blowjob will not cause the death of anyone,” Nicky interceded, and Nile cringed; she was learning that Nicky could be excruciatingly frank about sex. “You are much more important.”

“Sit with us.” Joe patted the duvet. Nile looked at it dubiously, but Joe must have remade the bed while Nicky followed her out. She sat down next to him, and Nicky settled on her other side. “Now tell us, what’s the matter?”

“It’s just, well—” she gulped, fighting down another wave of tears. “You…you told me that I could come to you when I missed my family, instead of doing the B-Booker thing of keeping it to myself... And it’s so stupid, ever since Andy gave me my phone back I’ve only used it to look at my photos, but for some reason I decided to google myself, and I saw a picture of my mom at what must have been my f-funeral, she was holding the folded-up flag, and…”

She was enfolded in two pairs of arms. Their embrace surrounded her, limbs woven together in an unyielding lattice of muscle and bone. She didn’t know whose hands were stroking her back and whose were smoothing her hair; it didn’t seem to matter, they moved as one, exuding warmth and comfort. In a less distracted state she might have been flustered by it, the press of those bare chests, their broad shoulders and callused palms, but right now the living vitality of their skin felt like sinking into a hot bath.

Neither of them spoke. They didn’t tell her that she’d be okay, that it would hurt less with time and she would forget the sound of her mother’s voice and the way her brother’s eyes lit up when he told her about the latest book he’d read. They simply curled themselves around her until her grief abated.

Eventually, she hiccupped herself into exhaustion. “There’s another thing, too,” she croaked. “Earlier I was reading about how they’re finding really high levels of lead in Chicago tap water, and that’s my family, you know, the people who are gonna be affected by shit like that.”

“Like what happened in Michigan.” Joe’s voice, from somewhere above her head. “It’s fucking criminal, what happened there.”

“And there’s nothing I can do,” she went on. “I keep wondering, when is the time gonna speed up for me, like it’s sped up for you guys and Andy? Am I gonna blink and suddenly it’s the twenty-third century and we’re living in an episode of _Black Mirror_? And there won’t be any more polar bears or glaciers, my mom and my brother will be dead, and Andy will, too—. The whole ecosystem is collapsing, and, god, what is the world even gonna look like?” She hiccupped again; her breath was starting to come in hysterical little pants.

“Nile, listen to me.” That was Nicky; she could feel him exhale against her neck. “What you say—some of this is true, yes. Nature and society, as you have known them in your lifetime and in your imagination of the future, they are going to change completely. It is inevitable.”

“And you have to ask yourself, ‘how do I want to experience this change?’” Joe said, voice rumbling deep in his chest. “Do you want to become hardened by grief and cynicism—like Booker did, like Andy did after we lost Quynh—convinced that you’re separate from everybody else struggling against the end of an age, struggling against something totally unknown?”

“Or can you accept that change is the fundamental characteristic of life?” Nicky continued, and Nile shivered. They were uncanny in conversation, Joe and Nicky, one picking up smoothly where the other left off. “This is something that Yusuf and I have wrestled with mightily for many centuries. We have each other—an extraordinary gift. But we also live with plants and oceans and animals and snow and people, and none of them can remain with us. We have the privilege of attending to them, caring for them, witnessing them… but it hurts, very, very much, when we lose them.”

“Our whole lives are about moving past that point of no return, Nile. But it’s not a dead end—or it doesn’t have to be. It can be a doorway, if you let it,” Joe said.

“A doorway to _what_?” she asked suspiciously, wiping her nose on her sleeve. Immortality was sounding more and more like a damn cult.

“We cannot know the answer.” Nicky shrugged eloquently. “We do what we are able, we bear the losses, and we… we see what happens. Yes?”

“If you can hold the pain of the world in your hand while taking in the beauty of the sunrise, then you can make a proper cup of tea,” Joe said.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Outraged, Nile disentangled herself from their arms and rounded on Joe, jabbing a finger into his sternum. “Is that more Gandalf you’re quoting at me?”

“No, that’s a Buddhist monk,” Joe said, chortling, the corners of his eyes all crinkled up.

“Well, aren’t you versatile,” she said tartly.

Behind her, Nicky choked on a laugh. Joe grinned. “Oh Nile, you have no idea,” he said, with a roguish wink that sent her blushing to the roots of her hair.

“Not like that, oh my god, Jesus Christ!” She looked from one to the other. “So is that what you guys are doing with your unlimited time? Trying to hold all the death and pain of the world in a teacup?”

“Something like that, yeah,” Joe said. 

“Though perhaps a coffee cup is more suitable? Joe and I are definitely coffee people,” Nicky added. 

“You guys are so _weird._ ” Nile considered the pair of them. Joe, with his curls wild and standing on end, probably from Nicky’s fingers. Nicky, with his silver earrings glinting in the lamplight, the metal nowhere near so bright as his eyes. “What about Andy?” she said. “How are you gonna bear that?” 

She had poked a wound that was too fresh to have formed a protective callus, or even a scab. Joe actually flinched, and Nicky closed his eyes briefly. Nile almost apologized—their grief was their business—but then she bit her tongue. All their philosophizing about teacups and sunsets was useless if they didn’t believe it themselves.

“We are an ecosystem, too,” Nicky said at last.

Joe’s hand crept across the mattress and nudged against the side of Nicky’s. Nicky immediately laced their fingers together, and Joe’s brow unfurrowed a little. “You came to us when Andy lost her immortality. That means we’re not collapsing, we’re simply… changing,” he said.

“And change isn’t good or bad, it’s just how it is,” Nile parroted back at him. Mildly exasperated, but this was Joe and Nicky she was talking to, and they always spoke in riddles. She gazed at their interlocked hands and felt a rush of affection for them, ridiculous ageless beautiful old men that they were.

“On the contrary, I think you are a very, very good change, Nile,” Nicky said warmly. “I think we will learn a lot from you, and you… you will learn to be not so embarrassed when you encounter us having sex, yes?”

“Oh my god!” Nile said, mortified.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Nothing makes me happier than hearing from you.


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